Michael Busby:  

My life has been a rollercoaster of experiences; some good, some bad, some funny, some sad, some terrifying, some hysterical, some simply happy - all have been interesting regardless of their impact upon my heart and soul. School - Le Syste'me se de'brouiller! Except for playing hooky every chance I could manage, I hated school! Want to know what I did when playing hooky while you were in class diligently preparing for a life of stress & heartburn? Purchase my book "Dixie's Corner", a story about teenage boys having fun with an old camera from amazon.com. Who knows, you might recognize your character in the book. (Are you listening Sheila, Brian, Danny, Paul, Max, Mary, Mike, etc.? Sorry Patsy, you didn't make the editorial cut.) College was an endless parade of all day study sessions followed by all night work sessions - I was a very young shift supervisor for the Naval Space Surveillance System in Mississippi while attending college. And all my high school teachers (& many classmates) thought I could not even get admitted to college! Five calculus courses later I made an A in Differential Equations (now DifEq is an interesting subject that finally caught and held my attention - love the advanced math!). After graduating with a BSEE, I worked as a project engineer & engineering manager on many of the big international defense programs & systems now in use by U.S. & foreign military organizations. Worked on the MBA at the University of Iowa. Now, I am doing well, & enjoying life. I served in the United States Marine Corps for 8 years. As they say, I received an offer I could not refuse, so I left the Marines & began an interesting & exciting job working for Rockwell International in a variety of overseas defense and CIA contract jobs. While the embassy employees were scrambling to get out of the Tehran embassy on the morning of November 4, 1979, I was fighting to get inside! I had just escaped from a firing squad south of the city & tried to wend my way to the embassy that I thought was a safe haven. I wound up fending for myself & was repatriated a couple of days later to Frankfurt, Germany. (So Dixie B., I was not lying when I told you I was going overseas, yet again, and thought it was not a good idea to get married. Three co-workers were assassinated earlier in Iran. It looked like my turn was next. It was classified work for the CIA so I could not tell you what I was doing...at the time. Now I can tell you it was a CIA/NSA program to steal Soviet Union space & military secrets named Project Ibex aka Dark Gene.) I have passed through Frankfurt more times in the past 45 years than Carter has pills, I think. (Every time I needed to "reset" I passed through Frankfurt! As it is, I have wonderful German friends who own a farm & hostel in Hof Hunds Richt on the Rhine about 90 clicks from Frankfurt so I am able to visit them quite often. Anyway, from Frankfurt I returned to Washington D.C. for a short while then I was off to Saudi Arabia. I arrived in Taif just in time to witness the nearby assault on Mecca by the Iranian terrorists. (I evened the score.) There I met my (ex)wife. She was Anglo-Indian & worked as a flight attendant for Saudia Airlines. We had a storybook kind of romance, meeting in beautiful Asian & European cities for weekend trysts, vacationing around the Med, Black Sea, & Indian Ocean. We honeymooned in Bombay, Calcutta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, & Denver. We were married 23 years & have three wonderful boys. I lived in Plano, Texas for years, or more accurately, I maintained a home in Plano. I spent a good proportion from 1969 until now traveling/living/working around the world. I did various contract jobs for governments mainly in Europe, Asia, the Middle East & Africa. Had a lot of fun, dodged a few hand grenades & some bullets, plotted the overthrow of foreign governments, & lived life with an incredible zest that amazes me today when I reflect upon the past. I did a job in East Africa in 1999/2000 & decided I needed to slow down (the grenade that landed in the outdoor Italian restaurant in Kampala one balmy summer afternoon actually decided it for me) so I accepted a Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Flight Test Director contract in June 2000. In 2004 I was Rockwell Collins' Technical Director for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment's (of "Blackhawk Down" fame) small ball FLIR development program. In January 2005 I accepted the position of VP of Engineering with a company that advises the Naval Air Warfare Center (Aircraft Division) regarding acquisition of future naval aircraft and weapons systems. This year I moved to the New York City area to be near my current job as CEO of Systems Security Engineering & Technologies. We provide expert advice to government & industry regarding protection from foreign exploitation of advanced American science & technology in defense systems. I have three boys that are the best part of my life now. We ride motocross on Harris Ranch near Bulcher, Texas on weekends when I can get to Texas. The two oldest boys are Eagle Scouts & all three boys were honors students in school. The youngest graduated from a university in Tokyo (there went my planned retirement this year!), the middle boy graduated from the University of Texas, & the eldest son is the Western Pacific sales rep with an office in Hawaii for a company that sells defense products and systems. Most of my pleasant childhood memories are from the time I was a child living on my grandfather's ranch on Red River. Then my mother re-married & we moved to Bowie, Texas. After roaming like a wild Indian over the hills & valleys along Red River, I was devastated when we moved to Bowie. I thought I was in the worst place in the world & I hated every day I was confined in that awful town. I hate Bowie to this day & will never return for any reason. The summer of my sophomore year, I went to live with my eldest brother who owned a country grocery store in East Texas. It was not Red River, but at least it was the country & I began to enjoy living again. Skipped school to go hunting a lot, even with the principal living just across the highway from my brother's store, never did any homework, and still passed all classes with an A, or B. I have many memories of the years gone by since high school. I remember war, plane crashes, burned bodies, dead friends, great mentors, brave heroes, and a few cowards. I have traveled many roads in my life. I remember roads that led to terror, to thrills, to love, to intrigue, to disaster, to opportunity, and to loneliness, but I don't recall a single one that has led to ein bisschen frieden. My mind today is an array of swirling images imaged during a time of great change in the world, most of the change wrought by the serious end of a rifle. If you only knew. I do know & there is no real inner peace for me. As a result of my work and travel the past 45 years I have visited 49 of the 50 United States, five continents, 73 countries & several large & small islands. I have enjoyed exploring new lands & especially tasting the great variety of food (except for Kazakhstan's horse liver pate' and Philippines' balut) & experiencing the different cultures. I had interesting experiences working for Rockwell International in the 1970s thru 1990s as a contractor for the DoD & CIA. I enjoyed/suffered: Saudi Arabia: many trips across the deserts of Arabia; water from Abraham's well; the beautiful escarpment of Taif; Al Hada & the baboons; too many death-dealing vehicle crashes in the Kingdom to mention but each left an indelible impression with the horribly burned & mangled bodies strewn on the roads and the nearest help hundreds of miles away; the unimaginable, blazing, brain-busting, skull-cracking heat of the Rub Al-Khali; the beautiful sands of the Najd & the fragile desert roses; the humidity of Jeddah along the Red Sea & the enchantment of the Corniche in the evening; the waters of Narjaran; the warm welcome from the towns Al Wedge & Badana (first non-Arab person they ever met); barbecued camel; Saudia flight attendants; Riyadh nurses; Taif palaces (the 316 Jordanian dancing girls for 7 of us & the Prince - what a weekend!); the sea at Daharan; beautiful sunrises & sunsets from the mountains above Mecca; camels; bomb-sight toilets (interesting observation regarding these toilets in Ukraine - after 6:00pm men & women share the same facilities); angry Al Hada baboons ripping an Arab apart; shawarma's (how nice they were late in the evening); "broasted" chicken & rice; public executions; Friday prayer; shopping in the best stores in the world; the gold souk; mud villages; the King's hunt & yacht; & the beautiful (foreign) women; my villa & the numerous nude nurses & flight attendants sunbathing every day (European women were nothing like the up-tight women of Texas) around my pool. I loved Arabia; Iran: gorgeous Iranian women; the barren hills of Iran; goat cheese pizza (arghhh!); women peeing in the street; assassinations; revolution; Teheran cemetery (saved my life); the American embassy; Canadian & German friends; late night meetings; Project Ibex (a combined NSA/CIA/DoD clandestine project to steal Soviet Union military & space secrets); escape from a firing squad the morning of 4 November 1979. Sure hated to leave the $5 million in CIA cash in the office safe but prudence dictated I go in hiding until I could escape the country. Never knew what happened to the money. Egypt: pyramids; Cairo museum; gorgeous women; Israel: Christian holy places; obnoxious Jewish people; friendly Arabs; India: gorgeous women; huge roses; cheap living; wonderful food (try roghan josh with aloo ghobi); the smell of spices - ah - the smell; crowded trains (a first class seat on the steps of a coach with feet dangling into the air!); friendly people; Thailand: the most beautiful women (French-Asian) in the world, beautiful beaches; Switzerland: storybook s...Expand for more